SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for the series premiere finale of “Task,” now streaming in HBO Max.
“Task,” Brad Ingelsby’s follow-up to “Mare of Easttown,” starts out like a slice-of-life drama before erupting in explosive violence in the last half of its first episode.
Viewers are introduced to Tom Brandis, a former priest-turned-FBI agent, played by a paunchy Mark Ruffalo. He’s struggling — drinking too much, and sleeping too little — clearly haunted by a tragedy that the show has yet to fully reveal (though it’s known his son is in prison). Tom doesn’t seem too interested in his job. He’s on career fair duty, until he grudgingly gets assigned to run a task force to look into a string of robberies targeting the drug houses of a motorcycle gang called the Dark Hearts. And your ears don’t deceive you — the characters in “Task” speak with the same regional Pennsylvania honk as the characters in “Mare of Easttown.” Both shows are set in the blue collar communities around Delaware County.
Unlike “Mare of Easttown,” which was a whodunit, “Task” doesn’t disguise who is behind the crime spree. That would be a garbageman named Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), who uses his route to scope out potential targets. He may be a criminal, but he seems like a decent guy: He’s a single dad who is raising his kids with his niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones). Even when her uncle messes up her date, interrupting Maeve while she making out with the guy and getting in a shoving match with him, it’s hard to root against Robbie. Well, at least until Robbie and his fellow bandits Cliff (Raúl Castillo) and Peaches (Owen Teague) sneak into a drug house and fail to get the upper hand on the dealers, leading to a savage confrontation. (Peaches, we hardly knew ya!).
But there’s one more surprise in store. A young boy is in the house too, leaving Robbie and Cliff with no choice other than kidnapping him since he’s seen them without their masks. Having crossed that moral rubicon, can a confrontation between Robbie and Tom be far off?
Ahead of “Task’s” debut, Ingelsby, Pelphrey and Jones unpack the explosive first episode of the seven-part HBO limited series.
Brad, when you wrote this show, why did you decide to have it unfold in Delaware County, the same place where “Mare of Easttown” was set?
Brad Ingelsby: It’s just laziness. It’s the people I know. It’s the blood in my veins. If I can write stories about this area for the rest of my life, I’d be satisfied. If I write a story about a group of people in Wisconsin or in Minnesota, I’ve got to do some research. I’ve got to spend time there to get a sense for the rhythms of their life. So for me, it’s about wanting to tell a story about the people that I grew up with. Even though I don’t know an FBI agent or a cop, my uncle was a priest who left the priesthood. So there are connected pieces of my own life. I also felt like I had more stories to tell there. It wasn’t as if “Mare” exhausted that in me. “Mare” was very much about a mother and a son. In “Task,” with Tom especially, it’s about guy who has seen the pillars of his life and everything he held as true come crumbling down. He’s trying to make sense of his suffering.
Is this story part of the same of universe as “Mare of Easttown”?
Ingelsby: Absolutely. We wanted to embrace that. We never said, “Let’s try to make it not like ‘Mare.’” In fact, a lot of the same crew from “Mare” worked on this show, because we wanted there to be a consistency, and we wanted the audience to watch the show and think, “This is ‘Mare’s’ world, but the story is different.”
What were you hoping to set up with this first episode?
Ingelsby: The first episode is trying to establish the collision course of the show. It was important to establish the two leads and their home lives and their jobs. I wanted to have an audience leaning in to the emotional arcs of the characters. They know something’s going on with Mark’s character and something’s going on with Tom’s character, but we don’t know too much. Then we also have to have the plot get on the tracks, and by the end of the first episode, establish that Mark’s character is going to be investigating a string of robberies led by Tom’s character. We needed to establish the dual tracks of the story, which are the dual tracks of the entire series — the emotional lives of these characters and then the procedural element of the show.
We get a real sense of Robbie and Maeve’s domestic life in the episode, and the warmth and chaos of their house. What do you remember about filming those scenes?
Tom Pelphrey: It was beautiful. It was out there in a place called Downingtown. It was a bit of a drive from where we were normally filming stuff. But it was amazing, because it was the actual house, there was no recreation on a stage somewhere. Our set decorators did such an incredible job. It felt so lived-in, down to the messiness of how the toys weren’t put away. That made our jobs easier.
Emilia Jones: I loved filming there because no one had any phone connection. There was no distraction. We could all really muck in. We were entertaining the kids in between scenes and takes. We were all just hanging out constantly. That helped us bond. That was important because we’re supposed to be a close family.
That comes through in the scene where Maeve has made dinner using Ree Drummond’s recipe and no one wants to eat her food.
Jones: Maeve spends a lot of time cooking and cleaning and trying to create structure for these kids. And then Robbie comes in and messes with it. Maeve is tired. She’s really, really tired. But those scenes were a lot more fun to shoot than I thought they were going to be. I had to constantly remind myself, “I’m tired, I don’t like it.” I was having a good time, you know? I mean, Oliver [Eisenson], who plays Wyatt, says “chicken butt” a lot in the show, and he said it a lot off camera as well. Our director, Jeremiah Zagar, did a lot of handheld stuff and followed us around, which helped make it seem more chaotic.
Maeve’s frustration with her life comes out in the scene where she goes on a date for the first time in forever and brings a guy home. What’s she hoping for when her evening begins?
Jones: Maeve has been feeling stuck and is kind of losing her sense of identity. She’s very excited to hang out with someone new outside her family and not talk about farts and things. She’s sick of always picking up after the people in her family — first her dad, and now Robbie as he spirals into criminal activity. When Robbie doesn’t let her go out and have some fun on her date, she just snaps. Maeve is trying to be patient because she does love family.
What does it say about Robbie that by scrounging around his niece’s room, he messes up her evening?
Pelphrey: Well, there you go. That pretty much sums up Robbie. He’s just going for a stroll around the house, checking that all the chickens are laid to rest. He gets a little nostalgic, and then he’s in a bad situation.
Are there parallels between what Mark Ruffalo’s character is going through and the struggles that Tom’s character is experiencing?
Ingelsby: There are parallels. As the story builds, you’ll find even more parallels up to the point where the two characters collide. It’s a story about two fathers, whereas “Mare” was a story about mothers. It’s also about two guys who are processing loss in different ways. With Robbie, it’s the loss of his brother and the absence of his wife and the real uncertainty as to whether she’s ever going to come home. With Tom, it’s understanding a profound loss in his life. They both love their families and are trying to take care of their families. They feel like maybe they let their families down. The deeper the show goes, the more you start to see how close these characters are. When they ultimately have scenes together, they see that as well and discover these pieces that connect them.
What was it like to shoot the invasion of the drug house scene, which goes spectacularly off-the-rails?
Pelphrey: That was our first week. Jeremiah had mapped out exactly what we were going to do. He knew how he wanted the frame to be filled, when the camera moved, where and why. We rehearsed the physical action of it so the timing was in sync with the cameraman. Wearing the mask was cool. It’s a powerful thing to to not have your face to express anything. You have to think about how you use your body; how turning your head a certain way helps communicate something to the audience that you’re not doing with your voice and you can’t do with your eyes.
The violence is really brutal.
Ingelsby: The idea was to lull the audience into loving Rob. But then the audience needs to understand the stakes at play. The structure of the first episode is a bit of a build. It doesn’t start with the crime, and then we’re in the immediate aftermath. We actually live with the characters quite a bit, and we get into their lives. And then only at the end of the episode is it punctuated with this violence that is startling. Then it’s like, “Oh, wow.” These are the consequences of what they’ve done. Because at that point in the story, we really like Robbie and Clinton. We’re kind of like, “These guys are cool. I can hang out with Peaches.” And now one of our crew is dead, and now they have this little boy they have to take care of. We wanted it to be really violent. In fact, I talked to Jeremiah and we went over the pistol whipping moment. Every time we talked about that, I said it needed to be really shocking. We did a similar thing in “Mare” where the body doesn’t turn up until the very end of the first episode. In “Task,” it’s kind of a character piece, and at the very end, the plot takes hold.
Can you talk about that last image of Robbie returning home with the kid in his arms?
Ingelsby: We wanted to end with that haunting shot where you think, “What’s going on in that house right now?” We wanted to leave the audience with the door closing and have them going, “Oh my God.” We need them to have an unsettled quality when the credits roll.
This interview has been edited and condensed.